//Box advert for the Beckenham Arts Lab run by David Bowie and Mary Finnigan in IT #59, July 1969//

//News story about the Goldsmiths Arts Festival organised by Malcolm Edwards and his fellow student Niall Martin in IT #59//

Researching my archive during lockdown for a project has given me the opportunity to thoroughly assess individual publications, none more so than the 59th issue of underground paper IT, which hit the streets in early July 1969.

This particular edition features a couple of small items which provide clues as to the countercultural activities at the time of two Londoners who would go on to define pop culture in the 1970s: David Bowie and Malcolm McLaren.

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Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Beckenham Arts Lab, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, David Bowie, Give Peace A Chance, Goldsmiths College of Art, Harold Pinter, IT, King Crimson, L. Ron Hubbard, Mary Finnigan, Mick Jagger, Plastic Ono Band, Pretty Things, RD Laing, Rolling Stones, Sun Ra, William Burroughs

The countdown is on to this years’s most exciting street-style collaboration: the limited edition Barney Bubbles x Fred Perry collection.

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Tags: 4000 Weeks' Holiday, Armed Forces, Billy Bragg, Cracking Up, Depeche Mode, Do It Yourself, Elvis Costello And The Attractions, Hawkwind, Henrietta Street, Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Ian McLagan, Nick Lowe, Rob Tufnell, Rolling Stones, Sir Peter Blake, Small Faces, The Faces, The Specials

//Top: Entrance to Ealing Club stairwell with jeweller’s to its right, early 1960s. Photo: ealingclub.com. Above: The entrance as it is today//

“Suburbia is the breeding ground for the richest and most innovative cultural production of the 20th and 21st centuries” Rupa Huq, writer and MP for Ealing Central & Acton, 2013

An advert in the New Musical Express for a “Rhythm & Blues Night” staged 55 years ago today – on St Patrick’s Night, March 17, 1962 – sparked the British musical revolution which soundtracked youth culture in the West for decades.

The ad proved a lure for suburban London teenage r&b fans including Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, while Eric Burdon, soon to be vocalist with The Animals, hitchhiked the 300 miles from Newcastle to join them in witnessing the main performance by Blues Incorporated (in fact he and Jagger traded verses on stage during a rendition of Billy Boy Arnold’s I Ain’t Got You).

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Tags: Alexis Korner, Art Wood, Billy Boy Arnold, Blues Incorporated, Charlie Watts, Cyril Davies, Ealing Club, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood, Rupa Huq, The Animals

//The Michael Joseph image which was to be central to the 1971 Fernet-Branca campaign was featured in Dave Saunders’ survey Sex In Advertising, published by Batsford Books in 1996//

//Front, Funk Spectrum, BBE Records, 1999. Photo: Michael Joseph//

//Back, Funk Spectrum, BBE, 1999. Photo: Michael Joseph//

In 1971 the great advertising director and photographer Michael Joseph was commissioned to shoot a billboard campaign for the Italian digestif Fernet-Branca.

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Tags: BBE Records, Brent Sherwood, Dave Saunders, David "Piggy" Worth, Fernet-Branca, Funk Spectrum, Gala Pinion, Judy Nylon, Keb Darge, Lord Snowdon, Masters At Work, MIchael Joseph, Norman Parkinson, Pete Rock, Peter Lyster-Todd, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, RZA, Sex In Advertising, Syd Barrett

//Judy Nylon at David “Piggy” Worth’s basement flat, Edith Grove, World’s End, London, 1971. Photo:©Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

//Nylon and  Worth amid the cut-outs, props and mannequins in his flat, 1971. Photo: © Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

It is a great honour to feature this guest post by the artist and thinker Judy Nylon about her friend David “Piggy” Worth and their life and milieu in London at the turn of the 70s (brought up in Boston, Nylon had arrived in the UK capital at the start of the decade). The photographs, like those posted here at the weekend, were taken by Tony Hall as he set out on his career in photography, and have not been previously published…

THERE was a time when I smoked and owned skirts.

I lived at 14 Edith Grove, just south of Fulham Road, in a house owned by Donald and David Cammell just after they’d done Performance.

Piggy lived further down Edith Grove below the King’s Road, in a basement flat that was like stepping into his imagination. He had collections of clothes, props and small objects.

//”Like stepping into his imagination.” Nylon and Worth and part of his clothing/antiques collection. Photo: © Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

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Tags: Anello & Davide, Avon, Beggars' Banquet, Clovis Ruffin, Dave Saunders, David "Piggy" Worth, Dunhill, Findus, Hovis, Ian MacDonald, Judy Nylon, MIchael Joseph, Player Specials, Ridley Scott, Rolling Stones, Silk Cut, Tony Hall, Tony Scott

//Front cover, Elemental, The Earth, Rare Vinyl, 2016. Design: Ian Harris//

Ian Harris is one of those London characters who turns up at various stages in the capital’s post-war pop culture narrative.

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Tags: 39 Gerrard Street, Alan Parsons, Black Sabbath, Coffin Club, Elemntal, Genesis, Ian Harris, Janet Street-Porter, Kleptomania, Pretty Things, Record Collector, Regent Sound Studios, Rolling Stones, Terry Tonik, the Beatles, The Earth, The Who, West One

//From Vacant by Nils Stevenson, photo: Ray Stevenson//

If you are of a London gig-goer of a certain (getting on to be advanced) age you will remember “Jesus”, an enthusiastic audience member at many musical events in the capital from the 60s to the late 70s.

//Detail: Hynde, Rotten, Matlock and Jesus. Photo: Ray Stevenson//

Jesus was notable because a) he was personable and b) would often discard his clothes as he energetically idiot-danced stage-front. Jesus liked to frolic with abandon, more often than not exposing much, or even all of his rail-thin body.

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Tags: Bachman turner Overdrive, Brian nevill, Chuck Berry, Clive Jellett, Glastonbury Fayre, Jeff Dexter, Jesus, Johnny Rotten, Magic Michael, Mick Jagger, Mr Fish, Nils Stevenson, Patti Smith, Ray Stevenson, Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols, The Marque, The Nashville Rooms, The Rainbow, The Ramones, UFO, Vacant

//Richard Wernham, Nick Garvey, Robert Gotobed, Rob Smith on the front cover of Teenage Head/Lights Out by The Snakes, Dynamo Records, 1976//

I went to a good school (it was approved, as my first editor would have it in the late 70s. You had to be there).

I was taken on as a scholarship boy, one who showed enough promise for the fees to be paid by the council.

But I was lazy, not as bright as I made out, unhappy, an under-achiever. Aside from winning the cross-country race when I was 14, my life there was almost entirely undistinguished, so preoccupied was I with music, clothes and girls. I had pretensions to vast knowledge in all three areas undercut by lack of experience in the latter regard.

//Booklet with Quadrophenia, an album about "a cat with four personalities" according to me, 1973//

//School report 1975: "If Paul is as familiar with DG Mackean's Introduction To Biology as he is with the NME, he will pass his O-Level. As it is, he isn't, so I fear he won't." And I didn't//

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Tags: Ace Skudder, Acme Attractions, Bazooka Joe, Bull & Gate Kentish Town, DG Mackean, Dr Feelgood, Ducks Deluxe, Eddie & The Hot Rods, Flamin' Groovies, Hawkwind, Introduction To Biology, Keith Richards, Kickers, New Musical Express, Nick Garvey, Pink Fairies, Quadrophenia, Robert Gotobed, Rolling Stones, Royal College Of Art, Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Sex Pistols, Shakin' Stevens & The Sunsets, Stewart Wernham, Teenage Head, the 101'ers, The Motors, The Snakes, Wire

//From the catalogue for next week's auction//

The spirit of great British boutique culture is summoned by a couple of lots in next week’s Pop Culture sale at Christie’s.

One is a previously unpublished June 1967 photograph of Jim Hendrix not in Carnaby Street as captioned, but outside the tobacconist Finlay’s, which was in Foubert’s Place. It’s evident from the carrier bag in his famous left hand that the guitarist had just visited  I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, which was next door to Finlay’s and the place where he bought the Hussar’s jacket worn in this photograph and at Monterey Pop that same month.

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Tags: Christie's, I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet, Jane Wentworth, Jimi Hendrix, Jon Wealleans, Kleptomania, Rave, Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood, The Wick, Tony Sanchez

A couple of months back I was commissioned to review Andrew Loog Oldham’s latest book Stone Free for a website, but my copy was rejected on the basis of my use of  “criticism”; they prefer to keep things – in their words – “upbeat”.

I like the commissioner, think the site is good and had no problem with the rejection, but thought it may be of interest, so here it is:

“I have little use for the past and do not give it much thought.”

Now that is rich.

One anticipates and has often applauded bare-faced sauce from the music business maverick turned self-chronicler Andrew Loog Oldham, author of Stoned (384 densely-packed pages of reflection on life from birth in 1944 to the point of managing the Rolling Stones in 1963, with “drug-cuts” into the 70s and 80s), 2Stoned (480 pages on his four-year stewardship of same) and a “fictionalised biography” of Abba (on which we need not dwell).

When this confession – even if it is soon qualified – arrives 10 chapters and 140 pages in to Oldham’s new digital-only tome Stone Free, it produces a whoop not of glee but of derision.

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Tags: 2Stoned, Alec Morris, Allen Klein, Andrew Loog Oldham, Don Arden, Edward Albee, Frank Rich, Johnny Rogan, Lana Clarkson, Larry Parnes, Phil Spector, Rolling Stones, Sergei Diaghilev, Sharon Osbourne, Small Faces, Stone Free, Stoned, Svengalis & mythmakers, The Babys